Thanks @malcolmlewis, I’ll try uninstalling suse-prime but it wasn’t a problem when I first installed openSUSE with the Nvidia drivers up until several updates. Was able to boot into gui on battery or plugged in. I can go back to an older snapshot but then when I update, the problem appears.
After uninstalling suse-prime and rebooting on battery only, I was able to reach a gui and sddm. I repeated this several times even from cold boot and each time booted to gui as expected. Adds more mystery. I had uninstalled upower (by suggestion of @dcurtisfra) and suse-prime was still installed and was able to reach a gui booting from battery (several times until that stopped working). Also, had upower, suse-prime, and Nvdia drivers on an earlier snapshot without issue - no issues with any of the prime-select options too:
sudo prime-select boot offload | nvdia | intel
Without prime-select, losing functionality for the hybrid graphics is a big negative. Same with upower; what is a laptop without battery status and battery power management.
hybrid laptop, Leap is probably a bit long in the tooth.
That’s why I chose Leap for stability, things less likely to break…or so I thought 
Maybe I should try openSUSE Slowroll ?
@dad4linux There are alternatives, I use switcherooctl and only use the offload card when needed. I have an AMD dual GPU laptop, but also use on desktops without any issues, but my needs are mainly compute and encoding/decoding. Also works with Xorg or Wayland…
I reinstalled with Leap 15.6. The problem went away. I think some installation or config file got borked during an update but difficult to troubleshoot. Thank you all.
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